THE Tembari Children's Care (TCC) Inc is a day care facility at ATS Oro Settlement, 7-Mile, outside of Port Moresby, PNG. To date, it takes care of more than 200 former street children - orphans, abandoned and the unfortunate - by serving them meals twice a day, and providing them early education. Assistance - food and money - is sent by supporters who find merit in the services we provide to these children. At The Center, they are family. For all of these, we need support that is sustainable.

Sunday, September 26, 2010

Hands-on hotcake cooking lesson

Children preparing firewood on a stone-base stove.

Blowing air to build fire from a tiny ember.

Caption 3) Volunteer mother pours hotcake batter into the frying pan which I brought to The Center. See some hotcakes on a plate.

Hotcake mix now cooking slowly.

A Tembari kid poses next to a pile of whole meal flour from Lae Biscuits.

By ALFREDO P HERNANDEZA Friend of Tembari Children

ON SATURDAY, I taught our volunteer mothers how to cook hotcake, aka pancake.

Hotcake would be one of the four simple flour recipes that I am going to impart with the mothers so that they could maximize the use of two tons of whole meal flour that were donated to The Center by Lae Biscuits a few days ago.

The three other recipes I have lined up are steamed flour cake (puto, a Filipino cake), “chakoy”, a Filipino version of doughnut and “ginataang bilo-bilo” (flour balls cooked in coconut milk). I would teaching the recipes one at a time in the next coming Saturdays.

It appeared that our volunteer mothers are seeing for the first time how hotcake is prepared and cooked.

They know of a simple process to cook flour – make a soft mass of it and deep fry. That simple, and I knew how it felt in the mouth and tasted. This recipe is very common among many households in PNG, especially those outside Port Moresby.

I have noticed one thing: whole meal flour is quite difficult to use for hotcake recipe because it easily breaks up when trying to lift it from the frying pan. I would prefer using plain flour. But we have to use our flour stocks before they are spoiled by bugs.

What I taught them last Saturday was a hotcake recipe that I have been familiar with since I was a child. As a fifth-grader in the 60s, I cooked hotcake as source of additional income for our family, which I did right in front of our house. They were picked up buy passers-by and neighbors as afternoon snack.

I had to bring my own frying fan to The Center to make sure that I could produce hotcake that looked good. The Center does not have one.

Hotcake would serve as our preschoolers’ noon snacks after their classes in the morning. We have 45 of them plus another 42 children attending classes at 11 elementary schools in Port Moresby who would be coming home to The Center after lunch.

Since we have 97 children right now including toddlers, preparing 97 pieces of hotcake everyday would be a big challenge. So we needed a bigger hotcake pan that could immediately cook at least six rounds in one go. One hotcake could take at least 3 minutes to cook. Multiply that 97 times, you could easily imagine the number of hours you would need to cook them all.

This would require a hotplate the size of 20” x 30” steel plate, which would cost us K400 to acquire. It’s quite costly, so we are having second thoughts about buying it.

But it is required so I am looking for a sponsor who could provide us with this one.

As I have said, we have two tons of flour to deal with. We should be able to use it otherwise it would be taken over by flour bugs before we knew it.

Hopefully, now that our four volunteer mothers know how to cook a simple hotcake, which they will do for noontime snacks on Monday, Wednesday and Friday, we would be relieved of the costly tough biscuits that we used to serve to the children.

THE BLOGGER

ALFREDO P HERNANDEZ, A Friend of Tembari Children. Blogger APH came to Port Moresby, Papua New Guinea, in 1993 to join The National newspaper as one of its pioneering journalists. Working as Executive Sub Editor, he has remained with the daily, now the country’s No. 1 newspaper, up to these days. He has been a journalist since his university days in Manila back in the late 60s. APH’s involvement with the Tembari children began in January 2010 after he discovered them at a Christmas party for the city’s 500 unfortunate children held at the Botanical Garden in Port Moresby. That day, he was chasing a story for The National, which happened to be that of the unfortunate children in the city. His self-appointed job for Tembari children composed of orphaned, abandoned, neglected and unfortunate children is to look for people and groups who could provide them food, money, health services and facilities necessary to create positive changes in their lives. This job is difficult, but what the heck …!

(Our sponsored Saturday lunch for the 200 Tembari kids costs only K250.00 per sponsor (we usually have two), which covers a special meat (fish or chicken) dish, veggies, steamed rice and cordial drink. The Saturday lunch needs at least two sponsors. Some had given more, allowing us to give the kids a generous heap of the day’s lunch. A rare bonus to the sponsors, along with the bricks they earn each time, is that I personally cook the dish, giving it a personal touch. And as they earn a brick, each of our benefactors also earn a passage into the heart of the Tembari kids, which is also a prepaid ticket to Heaven.)